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Global Citizenship Education and Equality: Gendered Hegemonies, Tensions and a Global Gender Ethic

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Values, Religions and Education in Changing Societies

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Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which the concept of global citizenship opens up the debate about how to address global forms of male hegemony through education. The first part focuses on how concerns about female poverty and illiteracy in the global South need to be coupled with awareness of male controls of women. The development in Western liberal democracies of sexual and reproductive citizenship and related concerns about male violence against women take that critique further. The second part of the chapter explores how, in turn, such global critiques could be located in the hegemony of the North in terms of defining indi-vidualized notions of gender, and seemingly uncontestable notion of women’s rights. By considering some of the contemporary ramifications of shifting from national to global citizenship education, the chapter encourages greater reflectivity and global gender dialogue between the global North and South.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Gender education research and policy-making appears to be located more within development studies departments, government ministries and NGOs than in the university faculties of education or institutes for the training new teachers.

  2. 2.

    I would like to thank Shailaja Fennell for giving permission to reproduce some of our arguments here.

  3. 3.

    Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Professor of Women’s studies at Syracuse University. She came from India to the United States especially to study for her doctorate within the field of education. The trajectory of her argument can be traced in Mohanty (2003b, 2003c, 2003d, 2003e).

  4. 4.

    The plurality of gender relations in multicultural societies, such as those in Africa, also requires that gender difference should be replaced by differentiation with regard to oppression, conflict and struggle (Mohanty, 2003a). Mohanty argues that what is needed is a transnational multicultural feminism which is radical, antiracist and non-heterosexual and which can challenge a hegemonic capitalist regime; thus, the task that ‘feminist educators, artists, scholars and activists face is that of historicising and denaturalising the ideas, beliefs and values of global capital such that underlying exploitative social relations and structures are made visible’ (Mohanty, 2003c, p. 124).

  5. 5.

    Subaltern Studies emerged in the 1980s as an alternative approach to history, and social analysis more broadly, that focuses on the agency of non-elites (i.e., subalterns) to bring about political and social change.

  6. 6.

    See also Nnameka (1998, 2005).

  7. 7.

    See for example: Beck & Beck-Gernsheim (2001) for a discussion of the increasing individualisation of Western European society.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Madeleine Arnot

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  1. Madeleine Arnot
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Correspondence to Madeleine Arnot .

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  1. Umeå University, Umeå, 901 87, Sweden

    Karin Sporre

  2. Umeå University, Umeå, SE 901 87, Sweden

    Jan Mannberg

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Arnot, M. (2011). Global Citizenship Education and Equality: Gendered Hegemonies, Tensions and a Global Gender Ethic. In: Sporre, K., Mannberg, J. (eds) Values, Religions and Education in Changing Societies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9628-9_6

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